Historic Robinson Huron Treaty meeting observes original Treaty protocols

By Catherine Murton Stoehr

ANISHINABEK NATION TERRITORY— People who learn about the Robinson Huron Treaty case almost always ask some version of the same thing: What, Why, How could a payment be stuck at a rate set in 1875 when the revenues it was pegged to have increased exponentially since?

There is a depressingly long litany of actual answers to this question but likely the most mundane is the most important: Canada and Ontario wouldn’t talk to the Robinson Huron communities. Year after year, decade after decade, Lake Huron Anishinabek leadership reached out to Ontario and Canada’s leaders to discuss the long unpaid and ever-increasing debts, and year after year, decade after decade, the meetings were refused, delayed, or taken by a functionary endowed with the negotiating authority of a throw pillow.

That all changed last week on December 5 when the Honourable Marc Miller, Canada’s Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, and the Honourable Greg Rickford, Ontario’s Minister of Indigenous Affairs, met in ceremony with the Robinson Huron Chiefs for the first time since 1850.

Ogimaa (Chief) Scott McLeod of Nipissing First Nation, who was at the meeting, explained that “the real premise behind the meeting was that we [negotiate] these things in a colonial way… We felt that coming to meet with the 21 Robinson Huron chiefs or their representatives, along with Elders and Pipe Carriers, would carry a lot of weight in negotiating a settlement and fulfilling the obligations set down in 1850.”

According to Robinson Huron litigation management committee chair Mike Restoule, the committee had sent letters to both Ontario and Canada asking them to send their most senior ministers to a face-to-face meeting with the Chiefs “long, long ago.”  Then sometime in October, Minister Rickford contacted litigation trust member and former Ogimaa of Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory Duke Peltier, advising him that Ontario would be calling a meeting with the Chiefs. When the time came, Minister Miller was agreeable as well.

Dr. Alan Corbiere, a member of M’Chigeeng First Nation, a professor of history at York University, and an expert witness in the ongoing litigation, shared that Anishinabek people have long opened political discussions of this type, called council fires, first with making a fire, then a smoke, then opening words, and then sharing a meal together.  This “makes a shared environment, not of coming together, but of clearing your mind.” In this instance, the fire and the meal were omitted but the pipe (or pawaagan) ceremony and the remarks were observed.

Mike Restoule said that lighting the tobacco (semaa) in the pawaagan calls the spirits of the ancestors to a special meeting or event. The ancestors carry the smoke from the pawaagan to the Creator and then the Creator also is witness to the talks. It is this series of connections that makes the meeting sacred and “that’s why we asked the Pipe Carriers to bring their pipes there.”

According to Restoule, when the Robinson Huron Treaty was negotiated in 1850, Canada instructed William Benjamin Robinson to ensure that the negotiations were opened with a pawaagan ceremony.

Alan Corbiere has written that the British diplomat Sir William Johnson explained to his superiors why following the Anishinabek protocol of recording agreements in wampum belts served British as well as Anishinabek interests, saying that once an agreement was made “…we should tye them down (in the peace) according to their own forms of which they take the most notice.”

This was not the first time that Anishinabek legal, diplomatic, or spiritual practices have been brought into the Robinson Huron Treaty litigation process.  A sacred fire has burned at the location of the trials throughout, members of the court and lawyers from both sides of the litigation have sat in sweat lodges together, and special care has been taken to create space within the Western tradition of antagonistic questioning to allow Elders to share their knowledge with the court without facing culturally-inappropriate hostility.

Corbiere sounded a note of caution about both Canada and Ontario’s embrace of these Anishinabek practices. He noted that in the eighteenth-century, ministers of the Crown knew the protocols and obligations of alliance laid out by the 1764 Treaty of Niagara but over the years, even a practice as central to diplomacy as reciprocal gift-giving declined.

“Mutual gifts were downgraded to obligation then downgraded to custom.”

Speaking of gifts as custom was “how [the British] were able to justify discontinuing it. They (British or Canadian officials) would talk about [gifts] as an expense and year after year would discuss how to minimize that expense.”

Noting that promises of Canada or Ontario are only as good as the governments tasked with upholding them, Corbiere said that there are a lot of good things going on but wondered if “at one point they might hit a zenith and then start going down?” For instance, Corbiere asked if a Pierre Poilievre led federal government would see the integration of Anishinabek practices as progress?

“We must be more vigilant than hopeful; we can’t just hope they do the right thing. What they try to do is put on the sheep’s clothing in a sense. Are they using the ceremonies to do that?”

Ogimaa McLeod shared that both Ministers Miller and Rickford have indicated their willingness to continue meeting with the Robinson Huron Chiefs and noted that both ministers are “starting to comprehend how we see the relationships and the Treaty as a living breathing entity with its own spirit.”

While these meeting do not guarantee that justice will be served, Mike Restoule points out that justice will not be served without them. As proponents of a negotiated settlement have said throughout this long process, “Reconciliation cannot be achieved in a court room. It must be achieved by agreement between the parties.”

Agreements happen in meetings and if, after all these years Canada and Ontario are now willing to show up regularly and negotiate honourably with the Anishinabek, that can only be a good thing.